What a Carve Up!

by Jonathan Coe

  With that he left, pulling the curtain behind him. Fiona and I exchanged glances. She smiled bravely.

  ‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘At least he didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with my chest.’

  ‘I’ve never thought there was anything wrong with your chest,’ I said. Don’t ask me why: I know people are supposed to make stupid jokes at moments of crisis, but surely not that stupid. But she did her best to laugh, and perhaps it was, in a way, a kind of turning point: a final acknowledgement of the physical attraction I’d been running away from these last few weeks.

  The moment soon passed.

  Dr Bishop wasn’t long coming. He was young and gangly, with heavy bags under his eyes and an alarming shell-shocked, punch-drunk expression. It looked to me as if he’d had no sleep for thirty hours or more.

  ‘OK, I’ve been talking things over with the sister,’ he said, ‘and we’ve decided the best thing would be to find you a bed as soon as we can. It’s a busy night tonight and we need all the casualty bays we can get, so it’ll be better for us and better for you. They’re snowed under in radiology at the moment so we’ll have to get the X-rays done in the morning. We’ll get them done first thing. Anyway, as soon as you’re on the ward, you can have your first lot of antibiotics.’

  ‘The thing is, though,’ I said, ‘she’s got this lump on her neck. We wondered if that might have anything –’

  ‘The important thing is to find a bed,’ said Dr Bishop. ‘That’s the difficult part. If we can find you a bed, then we’re laughing.’

  ‘Well will that take long? We’ve been waiting –’

  ‘It’s pot luck in this place at the moment.’

  And with that unsettling remark, he disappeared. A couple of minutes later the nurse popped her head around the curtain.

  ‘Everything all right in here?’

  Fiona nodded.

  ‘Some of the staff are having a few drinks upstairs. Soft drinks, that is. Just to see in the New Year. I wondered if you might like anything.’

  She considered. ‘Some fruit juice would be lovely. Orange juice, or something.’

  ‘They were looking a bit low on orange juice,’ the nurse said doubtfully. ‘I’ll see what I can do. Would Fanta be all right?’

  We gave her to understand that Fanta would be fine, and then we were left alone again, for what seemed like a very long time. I could think of nothing to say except to keep asking Fiona how she was feeling. She said she was tired. That was all she ever complained about, feeling tired. She didn’t want to move, or sit up: she just lay on the trolley, holding my hand. She clutched it tightly. She looked terrified.

  ‘What’s taking them so long?’ That was my other heavily overworked piece of small talk. Just before midnight I went out into the corridor to see if anything was happening. Looking around for a familiar figure, I caught a glimpse of the casualty officer. He was rushing towards reception. I chased after him, shouting out, ‘Excuse me,’ but then he was met by a team of nurses pushing an unconscious patient along on a trolley. I stood at a short distance while he started asking questions. The patient had only just been brought in, apparently, after being found almost dead in a car. There was talk of carbon monoxide poisoning, and some earnest, low-voiced remarks were exchanged about his chances of survival. I wouldn’t have taken much notice of this, but as the trolley passed by I caught a glimpse of the patient’s face and for some reason it seemed distantly familiar. For a moment I was almost certain that I had seen this man somewhere before. But the feeling could have come from anywhere – it might just have been someone I’d passed in the street a few times – and I soon forgot about it when I felt a tap on my shoulder and found myself looking into the nurse’s beaming face as she said: ‘Mr Owen? I’ve some good news for you.’

  I didn’t understand at first, but as my mind came gradually into focus, thinking only of Fiona and the urgent search to find her a bed, I too broke into a relieved, helpless smile. It froze when I realized that the nurse was trying to place two plastic beakers into my outstretched hands.

  ‘There was some orange juice left after all,’ she said. ‘And listen.’ From the radio on the receptionist’s desk, we could hear the chimes of Big Ben as it sounded the hour. ‘It’s twelve o’clock. A very happy New Year to you, Mr Owen. Ring out the old, ring in the new.’

  Mark

  December 31st 1990

  When it became clear that a war against Saddam Hussein was inevitable, Mark Winshaw decided to celebrate by throwing an especially elaborate party on New Year’s Eve. He had no friends as such, but still managed to attract more than a hundred and fifty guests, drawn partly by the promise of each other’s glittering company and partly by stories of the extravagant hospitality for which Mark’s house in Mayfair was famous. There was a smattering of politicians and media people (including his cousins Henry and Hilary), and a few celebrities, but the bulk of the guest list was made up of middle-aged men whose dull grey paunchiness gave little indication that they were among the richest and most powerful captains of commerce and industry. Mark wandered between the groups of people, occasionally stopping to say hello, even more occasionally stopping to say a few words, but otherwise as aloof and inscrutable as ever. Meanwhile his young and beautiful German wife (he had remarried quite recently) seemed to be so busy attending to the guests that nobody saw her speak to her husband once all evening. The atmosphere was high-spirited, but Mark did not join in the hilarity. He drank hardly anything; he danced only once; even when he came upon a group of models taking turns to throw each other into the basement swimming-pool, he watched from a distance, without a tremor of feeling.

  Nobody saw anything unusual in this: those who knew Mark were accustomed to his reserve. He was clearly not enjoying himself, but then he had probably never learned how to enjoy himself, and he certainly never allowed himself to relax. Eternal vigilance was one of the preconditions of his wealth. At ten thirty-five, purely as a matter of routine, he went upstairs to check on security. Next to the one (single) bed in the master bedroom, a panelled door gave on to a small windowless room containing a wall of television screens and a control panel. Patiently he flicked the monitors on, one at a time, and looked for irregularities. The dining hall, the kitchens, the conservatory; the pool, the bedrooms, the lifts. The study.

  If Mark felt any shock or alarm at what he saw in the study, there was again no trace of it in his eyes. He watched closely, making sure that he had not misread the image. But it was plain enough. A man in a tuxedo was crouched over his desk. Somehow he had managed to pick the lock, and a set of papers had been laid out on the desk top. The man had a small camcorder and was slowly tracking along the desk, recording the contents of each document.

  When the man had finished, he put the papers back in the desk and slipped the miniature camera down the leg of his trousers. He looked around furtively, and looked up, although he failed to see the camera hidden behind a wall-lamp which was following his every movement. It was at this point that Mark recognized him. It was Packard.

  Mark left the monitoring room and took a lift down to the ground floor, calmly sifting this new information in his mind. He was angry, but not surprised. He’d been expecting something like this to happen: you always expected something like this to happen. And it made sense, in a way, because Mark now remembered a small detail: Packard had been carrying a video camera the very first time they met.

  ∗

  1983–1990

  Graham had left college with his ideals intact, but seven years later his student radicalism was, to all appearances, a thing of the past: he now occupied a managerial position with Midland Ironmasters, who supplied precision machine tools for the international market and were based just outside Birmingham. He had a house, a wife and a company car, spent a good part of the year travelling abroad at his employers’ expense and was on first-name terms with a handful of Britain’s most influential businessmen and entrepreneurs. His career gave every sign of being well
thought out and perfectly on course; but his fellow board members would have been shocked if they had known its secret goal.

  He had come to Birmingham soon after graduating, to take up a job programming films for a small arts cinema which went bankrupt within weeks of his arrival, halfway through a John Cassavetes season. Graham signed on the dole and didn’t work again for several months, when one of his new flatmates got married and asked if he would make a video of the wedding. The result was considered so professional that Graham decided to set himself up in business on one of Mrs Thatcher’s Enterprise Allowance schemes, confining himself to weddings at first and then branching out into promotional videos for local businesses. It was a far cry from his own self-image as subversive visionary, but the money was good and in the meantime he salved his conscience by doing unpaid work for the Labour Party and for various co-ops, unions and women’s groups in the area. In the evenings he pored over copies of Screen, Tribune, Sight and Sound and the Morning Star, and dreamed of the documentary he would one day make: a feature-length masterpiece using all of the cinema’s most dazzling resources, which would hold the worldwide capitalist conspiracy up to merciless, irresistible scrutiny. He dreamed, in particular, of making a film about the arms market, a subject which called for the politics of a Ken Loach or a Frederick Wiseman, combined with the outrageous plot and seductive glamour of a James Bond movie.

  It seemed a long way off: but Graham was to find his opening sooner than he imagined, and through an unexpected quarter. Packard Promos – as the one-man company now styled itself – was approached by Midland Ironmasters in the spring of 1986. It was the most important contract Graham had yet been offered: they wanted a thirty-minute video which would showcase every stage of their production process. The budget was comparatively big and he was shooting on to high resolution tape with stereo sound. Graham followed his brief carefully, and when he presented a rough cut of the film to the firm’s directors it was received with great excitement. There followed an animated discussion during which he was quizzed relentlessly for ideas about packaging and distributing the finished product: it quickly became obvious that he was dealing with novices, who seemed inordinately impressed by his routine proposals. The next day the managing director, a Mr Riley, invited him into his office and offered him a job as Head of Marketing. Graham had no intention of moving into this area and politely turned the offer down.

  Two days later something happened to change his mind. In preparation for the final edit he was making some establishing shots of the factory floor, when Mr Riley appeared, accompanied by a neat, ratty-looking man who seemed to be taking a guided tour of some of the latest machinery. When they spotted Graham and his camera, they approached and Mr Riley asked him if he would stop filming for a few minutes: clearly at the personal instigation of his guest. Now, at close quarters, Graham recognized him, even though it was some years since he had seen his picture, in a magazine article about illegal arms sales to South Africa.

  ‘No problem,’ he said, clipping the lens cap on to his camera. Then he held out his hand. ‘Graham Packard, Packard Promos.’

  The stranger took his hand and shook it reluctantly. ‘Mark Winshaw. Vanguard Import and Export.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you.’ He turned to Mr Riley. ‘A new contract in the offing?’ he asked, blandly.

  Mr Riley puffed out his chest and said, with a mixture of pride and obsequiousness: ‘The start of a long and fruitful relationship, I hope.’

  At that moment Graham took several decisions very quickly. If Ironmasters were doing business with Mark Winshaw this could only mean that they were going to let their machines, whether knowingly or not, be used for munitions production, probably in Iraq which was militarizing itself more rapidly than any other Middle Eastern country. From Mr Riley’s remark it sounded like a big, long-term contract. If he took a job with this company, he might be in a position to follow the progress of the deal, perhaps even to start building up contacts: in short, to worm his way inside the very network which he wanted to make the subject of his film, and which until now had seemed so hopelessly inaccessible.

  And so before going home that evening he asked to see Mr Riley, and much to his surprise and delight told him that he had reconsidered his offer and wanted to accept the marketing position. And over the next two years he would prove himself such an enthusiastic member of the team that promotion and extra responsibilities came swiftly, until he had moved from Marketing into Planning, and moved from Planning into Expansion, and in 1989 (not long after his wedding) reached the apogee of his career with Ironmasters when he was invited to represent the firm at the First Baghdad International Exhibition for Military Production which opened on Saddam Hussein’s birthday in April of that year.

  Meanwhile, as soon as Mr Riley and Mark Winshaw had left the shop floor, he took his camera and hurried upstairs to the boardroom, which commanded a good view of the car park and forecourt. Luckily it was empty. He knelt out of sight and, with only his lens peering over the window-sill, zoomed in on the two men, getting a good shot of them chatting and shaking hands next to Mark’s red BMW.

  Work on the masterpiece had already begun.

  ∗

  1990

  ‘The base at Qalat Saleh,’ said Graham, ‘contained twelve reinforced concrete underground aircraft hangars large enough to house two dozen planes, which would take off from an underground ramp, with their brakes on and afterburners lit.’

  Listening to his own voice on the headphones, he found it flat and less than compelling. But this was only a test commentary, to help him synchronize the words and the images. When the film was finished, he would hire an actor, someone known for his leftwing sympathies, and whose voice would carry immediate authority. Alan Rickman, perhaps, or Antony Sher. Of course, this would only happen if he managed to get some real money put behind the project, but he was starting to feel quite optimistic on that front. Preliminary discussions with Alan Beamish, head of current affairs at one of the largest ITV companies, had been very encouraging: as long as he still had a job, Beamish had said, he would do everything in his power to see that the film was supported.

  It was getting dark. Graham switched the light on and drew the curtains. The editing suite – actually the back bedroom of their house in Edgbaston – was directly above the kitchen, and he could hear Joan moving about downstairs, putting the finishing touches to dinner.

  ‘The 3,000 metre runways,’ said his voice on the tape, ‘were built behind mounds of desert clay, making them invisible to all but the closest observers.’

  ∗

  April 1987

  In the jeep taking them from Qalat Saleh to the test site, the Iraqi general had asked Mark for his opinion.

  ‘Not bad,’ said Mark. ‘Although the crew quarters seemed rather vulnerable.’

  The general shrugged. ‘You can’t have everything. Men are easier to replace than machines.’

  ‘You think those blast doors are safe?’

  ‘We think so,’ said the general. He laughed and put his arm around Mark. ‘I know, you only wanted us to buy them from the British because they were more expensive.’

  ‘Far from it. I’m a patriot, that’s all.’

  The general laughed again, louder than ever. Over the years he had come to appreciate Mark’s sense of humour. ‘You’re so old-fashioned,’ he teased. ‘We are living in an age of internationalism. These bases are a testament to that. Swiss airlocks, German generators, Italian doors, British communication systems, French hangars. What could be more cosmopolitan?’

  Mark didn’t answer. His eyes were hidden behind mirror sunglasses which reflected nothing but desert.

  ‘A patriot!’ said the general, still chuckling over the joke.

  The test was noisy but gratifying. They watched from a bunker dug deep into the sand as the target area, set up to resemble convoys of Iranian tanks, exploded with deafening blasts of fire from the 155mm GCTs positioned more than twenty kilometres away. The guns were
performing more accurately than even Mark would have thought possible, and as he saw the general’s eyes light up with excitement, he knew that he was going to make an easy sale. They were both in excellent humour as the driver took them back to Baghdad.

  ‘You know, it’s not that our leader doesn’t admire your country,’ said the general, returning to the subject of Mark’s patriotism. ‘It’s just that you make it difficult for him to trust you. So it’s a sort of love-hate thing with him. Our armies are still using manuals prepared by your War College. We still send our men to be trained at your air bases, and draw upon the expertise of your SAS. There is nothing better than a British military education. I should know: I was at Sandhurst myself. If only your military genius were backed up by honourable intentions in the diplomatic field.’

  Before returning to central Baghdad, they detoured to the Diyala Chemical Laboratory in Salman Pak, where a plant for the manufacture of nerve gas had been established under the guise of a university research facility. It was Mark’s third or fourth visit, but as they were waved through the heavily guarded entrance gates and escorted to one of the labs, he could not help being impressed, as before, by the scale and efficiency of the operation.

  ‘German engineering is the best in the world, there is no doubt about it,’ said the general. ‘And you know why? Because they are not just a nation of opportunists. There are people in Germany who really believe in what we are trying to achieve in Iraq. There’s something there that the British could learn from. You and I are not old enough to remember the days before ’58, when nearly all of our equipment used to come from Great Britain, but it’s possible to be nostalgic for such an arrangement. There can be no dignity when business has to be done clandestinely, behind closed doors. We want allies, you see. We want relationships. But all you are interested in is doing deals.’